Shawnee National Forest Bigfoot

Just outside Herod, Illinois, at the crossroads of Garden of the Gods Road and Karbers Ridge Road, visitors find a seven-foot-tall statue of a Bigfoot figure named Sassy.

The statue sits on land owned by Doug and Carrie DeVore, who operate Shawnee Forest Cabins nearby. The idea to place Sassy at their property came from Carrie, who had found a small Bigfoot figurine for sale and thought the area needed something similar on a larger scale. The finished statue weighs approximately 2,600 pounds; four men and a backhoe were required just to load it onto a truck for transport. By October 2016, the figure was established enough to be catalogued by Roadside America as a roadside attraction marking “the crossroads where several real Bigfoot have been sighted”.

Illinois has had more than 300 reported Bigfoot sightings, according to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO), and the Chicago Tribune has noted that the Shawnee National Forest has been the site of numerous ones.

The BFRO’s own files for the area include a June 2021 report from a camper near Camp Cadiz in Hardin County. He was driving a muddy old road near the campground while his wife caught something out of the corner of her eye, coming out of the wood line to cross the road before it went back in. She described it as black/brownish, upright and extremely tall, and told a BFRO investigator it stood 7.5 to 8 feet tall. Her husband wrote that she still doesn’t believe Bigfoot exists, but she knows she saw something she can’t explain. In neighboring Saline County, the BFRO lists two hikers who heard bigfoot-like sounds near Indian Point at Garden of the Gods in October 2021, a night-time sighting by two witnesses at a trailhead in the Shawnee in January 2009, and possible vocalizations heard by a camper near Williams Hill Pass in May 2006.

Carrie DeVore told the Chicago Tribune she only learned later how many sightings come out of the nearby forest, and people have phoned her to talk about their own supposed encounters with the creature. “I am sure there are people who have seen something,” she said. She could hear the earnestness in callers’ voices, but she was a geologist before going into the cabin rental business, and part of her asks, “We’d find some evidence, wouldn’t we?”

“When we showed up a few years ago, it was just everyone was talking about it,” Jessica Hoffman said.

The Tribune also put the question to Paul Garber, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign anthropologist who studies primates. Garber said the fossil record doesn’t support that, since Gigantopithecus died out around 500,000 years ago with no sign it ever reached North America. A large primate, he said, would leave telltale signs, from droppings to bones to the remnants of the “nests” apes sleep in. Moneymaker said the lack of proof could be because Sasquatches live in extremely remote areas, and Garber answered that other big apes live in remote areas too and their existence has been well documented. Garber attributes Bigfoot tales around the world to the human impulse to rationalize odd sights that defy ready explanation.

Sassy stands at the corner with a small parking lot and an information center for travelers, pointing the way to one of the most popular hikes in the Shawnee National Forest. Down the road, the Outpost is an old-fashioned general store that serves ice cream and sells plenty of Bigfoot paraphernalia.